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Ask HN: Anyone using DigitalOcean K8s (DOKS) in production?

by Syntaf on 6/3/23, 9:41 PM with 1 comments

I've been hosting small projects on DOKS for the past 2 years without any issue, but I seldom come across mentions of DOKS online compared to GKE / EKS - is there any reason why?

On a 3-node cluster running the cheapest node-tiers available I generally have no issue handling a couple thousand requests a day on my hobby sites, which doesn't necessarily say much, but pretty soon here I'm going to be launching a real product with my co-founder.

I'd like to stick with DOKS because of my familiarity, but I also don't want to stick with a technology that's going to come back to bite us if it turns out we can't scale with it.

If anyone has experiences or opinions here, please share!

  • by hitpointdrew on 6/3/23, 11:16 PM

    I have never used DOKS, but I wouldn’t really fret or worry it if I were you. You are using a managed k8s cluster, you should have everything you have deployed to it in git, and ideally something like Argo or helmfile where you could redeploy everything pretty easily.

    If you need to pivot it should not be very hard, your not managing your own k8s cluster where you would needed to rework Terraform code for a new cloud provider, and learn the idiosyncrasies of setting up the cloud control manager, adding storage classes etc.

    Since you are using managed k8s, I wouldn’t even think about DOKS, EKS, or GKE. Those are pretty irrelevant, at the end of the day you are using Kubernetes. Nothing you do in one can’t be used in another, your deployments, services, secrets, configmaps, ingresses, etc. are all going to be the same no matter your provider.

    The biggest pain point with switching cloud providers (if you had to) would be migrating your database (assuming you have one).